Meet The Graduate Chairs
Greetings ,

Within this email, you will meet the Graduate Chairs for the School of Natural Sciences.
The Graduate Group Chair is responsible for supervising graduate study in his/her Graduate Group, including planning and carrying out graduate student recruitment, ensuring that each graduate student is assigned an individual Faculty Advisor and mentor, ensuring the progress of graduate students through the program, determining resource needs and administration of the group’s budget, determining both graduate course offerings each semester and curriculum changes.

Please take a moment and meet your Graduate Chair. You will find their education, awards, and research interests. Additionally, you will also find the link to their website for more in depth information on their research.
Applied Mathematics Graduate Chair
Education: 
  • Ph.D., 2002 — University of California, San Diego
  • B.S., 1995 — Columbia University

Awards: 
  • 2010 — Best Paper Award, International Association of Engineers

Research Interests: 
  • Large-scale optimization
  • Scientific computation and numerical analysis
  • Compressed sensing and signal processing
  • Computational biology
  • Global optimization
Professor
Roummel Marcia

Chemistry and Chemical Biology Graduate Chair
Current Chair
Professor
Erik Menke

Education: 
  • Ph.D., 2006 — University of California, Irvine
  • B.S., 2000 — Colorado State University

Research Interests: 
Professor Menke addresses to broad questions through his research:
  • How does one prepare solar cells that are both cheap and efficient?
  • How does one use these solar cells to create chemical fuels?

To address these questions, he uses electrodeposition to prepare a variety of nanostructures to understand how the various properties, such as material, size, shape, and crystallinity, affect either their photovoltaic or catalytic properties.
Incoming Chair
Associate Professor
Christine Isborn

Education: 
  • Postdoctoral fellowship, 2009-2012 — Stanford University
  • Ph.D., 2009 — University of Washington
  • M.S., 2005 — University of Washington
  • B.S., 2001 — University of San Francisco

Research Interests: 
Developing and applying electronic structure theory, molecular dynamics and QM/MM methods to the modeling of:
  • electronic excited states,
  • photochemistry,
  • energy and electron transfer and
  • solvation.
Physics Graduate Chair
Current Chair
Professor
Sayantani Ghosh

Email: sghosh@ucmerced.edu
Education: 
  • Ph.D., 2003 — University of Chicago
  • B.A., 1998 — University of Cambridge
Awards: 
  • 2011 — Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER), National Science Foundation

Research Interests: 
Professor Ghosh's research interests cover both traditional topics and emerging multi-disciplinary themes in condensed matter physics. Her group focuses on the physics of new materials and using ultra-fast opto-electronic techniques, develops methods and protocols to manipulate their properties for applications in energy storage and information processing devices.
Incoming Chair
Assistant Professor
Chih-Chun Chien

Email: cchien5@ucmerced.edu
Education:
  • Ph.D., 2009 — Department of Physics, The University of Chicago
  • M.S., 2003 — Department of Physics, National Taiwan University
  • B.S., 2001 — National Taiwan University

Research Interests: 
  • Theoretical Atomic
  • Molecular Physics

Curriculum Vita: 
Quantitative and Systems Biology Graduate Chair 
Education: 
  • Ph.D. in Genetics, 1987 — Texas A&M University
  • B.S. in Genetics, 1981 — Purdue University

Research Interests: 
We are interested in fundamental questions in genome evolution and development, especially how they pertain to the emergence and divergence of biological novelty. Specific areas of interest include:
  • Origins of Adaptive Immunity
  • Programmed Genome Rearrangement in Development and in the Immune System
  • The Aquatic to Terrestrial Transition and the Role of Acquisition and Loss of Genes During This Major Transition

Discipline: 
Molecular Cell Biology
Professor
Chris Amemiya

Email: camemiya@ucmerced.edu
IMPORTANT: Please be sure to start checking your
UC Merced email in the MyUCMerced Portal
Want to learn more about the School of Natural Sciences Graduate Programs?
STAY CONNECTED